‘Cadence of Hyrule’ developers reflect on making a Zelda rhythm game

For some of the creative minds behind Cadence of Hyrule, being able to take their tested talents and apply them to game set in the world of The Legend of Zelda is an honor.

Three downloadable content expansions to Cadence of Hyrule recently released, bringing new playable characters, new songs, and a new story thread inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. The DLCs have boosted the Nintendo Switch game to an even richer experience a little over a year after it first launched.

With the new DLC out, Cadence of Hyrule‘s lead designer Oliver Trujillo and composer Danny Baranowsky spoke to Mashable over email about the rare opportunity to create a Zelda game, building rhythm-based action games, and their favorite parts of this genre-mashing game.

Mashable: What was the spark or idea that led to making these hybrid rhythm/action/adventure games like Crypt of the NecroDancer and Cadence of Hyrule?

Oliver Trujillo: The genesis of the idea behind the Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda game was an attempt to make a roguelike game that felt more fair. The dev team has long enjoyed playing roguelike games, but we felt there were some problems with the genre in that they could sometimes feel unfair. Due to the randomly generated nature of the levels and encounters, in most roguelikes the player can run into situations where an enemy is simply too strong for the player at the time of encounter, which can feel unfun. We set out to make a skill-based roguelike game, and our idea for doing so was making it action-oriented, giving the player only a certain amount of time to make each action. When playing, we quickly discovered that this felt like moving in a rhythm, so we decided to try setting it to the beat of a song. It felt fun, so we ran with the idea and the rest is history. 

What’s the difference in your approach when composing music for a more standard game soundtrack versus composing for a game where music is built into the mechanics?

Danny Baranowsky: The most interesting thing in the world for me is the way that music interacts with gameplay mechanics. Sort of explains my career choice! In some ways it’s easier to write a soundtrack for music-based games, but in some ways it’s more difficult. It sort of narrows your scope a bit — you know what you need to do, but you can feel boxed in. I’ll admit to getting a little tired of writing music that absolutely has to have a strong pulse on every beat. This is part of the reason behind doing the peaceful versions of the tracks. It confers a gameplay benefit, in that it signals to the player that combat has ceased and they are free to move. It also gave me an opportunity to write some stuff that had actual rests and space in it!

It also can provide unique challenges, both aesthetically and technically. When the development team comes to you and says things like, “So there’s a wizard with an oboe grafted to their face,” and “There are five giant knights with bass guitars,” it can be simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. An oboe is not exactly a high-energy instrument (at least in terms of electronic music instrumentation), so writing it in to fit with the pseudo-EDM-spookhouse-rock style of Crypt of the NecroDancer was a challenge. Kate Letourneau played the oboe parts and did an incredible job matching the intensity of the tracks she performed on.

On the more technical side, writing five-part harmonies for an ensemble of bass guitars that had to work each individually because each bass guitar’s audio would terminate when the corresponding knight was defeated — that was one of the more difficult things I’ve ever had to do as a composer. It was a situation I don’t think I ever would have faced in a non-music game! The usable range of a bass guitar is quite limited compared to most instruments, and even trying to fit ONE bass guitar in a mix can be a tough task. Joel Ford, who was actually also the mixing engineer on Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda, both recorded the bass and mixed the track, and did an absolutely incredible job mixing it. Multiple basses is virtually unheard of in mixing and Joel absolutely smashed it.

I’m always looking for new challenges. I’ve been doing this a long time, and video games are uniquely difficult in their musical requirements — especially music games! 

How does it feel to take that idea you established in Crypt of the NecroDancer and imbue it with something as storied and iconic as The Legend of Zelda?

Trujillo: It feels amazing! We’re big fans of the Legend of Zelda series and were honored to get the chance to pay tribute to it with Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda. We tried to include as many of our favorite Legend of Zelda songs, enemies, and characters as we could. We couldn’t include EVERYTHING we wanted to, but I hope our players feel that it does the series justice. I have fond memories of playing the original Legend of Zelda for NES with my father as a young child, and have played almost every other Legend of Zelda game since, and I know the rest of the dev team feels similarly.

Mashable: How does it feel to be making official Nintendo music remixes?

Baranowsky: So, I actually did an interview years ago where I was asked something to the effect of, “Which games would be your dream games to work on?” It was early on in my career and I hadn’t really ever thought about the question, but one of my answers was The Legend of Zelda! I’m fully aware of the immense privilege it’s been to be a part of this. The Legend of Zelda is sacred in so many ways. It’s strange that it’s so normal to me now. When I first found out I kind of lost my mind a little bit and it didn’t seem real. It still doesn’t seem very real! But I’m much more adapted to it now.

Any gig will become work at some point. Just because you’re working on something magical doesn’t mean that it’s gonna be all sunshine and rainbows the whole time. Cadence of Hyrule was hard work! It was important to me to absolutely nail it, both with the scope of music, the instrumentation, the source tracks selected, all of it. I gravitated to tracks I was personally invested in, like Gerudo Valley, Dark World, and Lost Woods, but I leaned on other team members with more comprehensive Legend of Zelda knowledge than me to make decisions for other tracks.

I shot for an even blend of tribute to existing Legend of Zelda tracks with a Crypt of the NecroDancer spin applied (like Overworld and Death Mountain), tracks with an even split between Legend of Zelda and Crypt of the NecroDancer (like the Tutorial Area/Kakariko Crypts), and original Crypt of the NecroDancer tracks with a Legend of Zelda spin applied (like Swamp and Ice Palace). 

I try not to be too dogmatic about my approach. Sometimes it’s best to just write what feels good. I focused on establishing a good ratio of Crypt of the NecroDancer to Legend of Zelda feel and just tried to maintain that balance. I’m more than happy with the results and the reception.

When you work on a beloved franchise like this, you know some people just will not like it, no matter what, and you mentally prepare yourself for that. I was fortunate enough to work on the Cave Story remake years back and got that experience, so I felt more prepared for the reception, whatever it ended up being. Working with something as colossal as Legend of Zelda certainly changed the scale of things, but I feel like after all these years, I was ready for it.

I’m endlessly grateful for the opportunity, and it’s been one of the highlights of my entire life!

How has the working relationship with Nintendo been?

Trujillo: It has been excellent overall, and an interesting insight into different game development methods. It is probably no surprise that Nintendo’s approach to game development differs from ours at Brace Yourself Games, them being a large Japanese AAA studio, and us being a small North American studio, but their feedback was always on point and incredibly beneficial for us. Nintendo was also very helpful in providing support in the form of outstanding QA testing and localization. Oh, and it was certainly a fun and illuminating experience to be able to visit Nintendo HQ in Kyoto and meet some of the Legend of Zelda team developers that we have so much respect for!

Mashable: What is your favorite thing in Cadence of Hyrule?

Trujillo: For the original game, my favorite thing is some of the bosses. It’s hard to choose one favorite, but if I had to I’d go with Wizzroboe. We had a lot of fun coming up with the music puns, the concept art, and game mechanics for all of the bosses, and the whole dev team enthusiastically pitched in on their designs. I’m very happy with how they turned out. For post-release content, my favorite is the Shopkeeper character. He was the most fun to design, and in my opinion has the most unique game mechanics out of all the characters.

Cadence of Hyrule is available now on Nintendo Switch.